ByMattMinahan

“Unlesswewakeourselvesfromthisreverie,thefieldasweknowitnowwillbeirrelevantin10yearsandextinctin20.Wecan’taffordtobepeopleofthestarswithouttheseriousgroundinginbusinessandoperationsthattherealworlddemandstoday.”

Change Our Name, Change Our Game.It’s Time for “Strategic Change.”

In signing off American Top 40, Casey Kasem used to say, “Keep your feet on the ground, and keep reaching for the stars.” It was a colloquial way of saying dream big but be realistic.

I’m afraid that for the past 4 decades if not more, OD in the US has taken the “dream big” part to heart but ignored the “be realistic” part. And has brought us to the brink of our own demise.

We have been a vibrant and thriving advocate for people over profits. We have brought an emphasis on relationships and employee engagement to the relentless focus on the bottom line. We have built teams in places where no one thought pos-sible. We have given people a voice in their own workplaces. We have empowered workers and increased self-determination. We have built capacity and made organiza-tions stronger for our efforts.

In short, without the work that we in OD do, the world would be worse, orga-nizations would be worse, jobs and work would be worse. And we would be sitting at a desk somewhere. Or painting. Or teach-ing yoga. Or riding our Harleys on road trips. Maybe we’re doing all those things already today along with our OD work.

But in the future that might be all we’re doing unless OD wakes itself—our-selves—up and starts to take itself seri-ously. Take our selves seriously. Take our businesses seriously. Take our clients seri-ously. And play a bigger game than the one we’ve been playing for too many decades.

We are discovery-ing, dream-ing and destiny-ing ourselves into a wonderful life in the stars . . . and irrelevance.

A serious look in the mirror shows that, especially in the US: » Our members are aging. » Our numbers are declining. » Though several are thriving, most of

our graduate programs are struggling. » Our graduates are doing talent manage-

ment more than organization design. » Most are blithely toiling away in the

social and symbolic systems, while too many are afraid to touch the technical or political systems.

» We have allowed the HR function to coopt our work and our jobs.

» Adjoining fields such as HR, coaching, and change management are larger, stronger, offer certifications and have empowered their membership associa-tions to take leadership of the field.

» We talk about a “seat at the table,” but too few of us can speak credibly about business problems with a CEO or COO. We don’t speak or understand the lan-guage of business.

Unless we wake ourselves from this rev-erie, the field as we know it now will be irrelevant in 10 years and extinct in 20. We can’t afford to be people of the stars without the serious grounding in busi-ness and operations that the real world demands today.

This is Not News

I’d love to say that these are brand new insights. But these truths have been self-evident to our elders and betters for years.

6 ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT REVIEW Vol. 51 No. 3 2019

As early as 1972, Larry Greiner raised red flags around OD’s inclination to priori-tize the individual over the organization, weighting the informal over the formal organization, pushing managers to be “par-ticipative, open, confronting, or authentic” regardless of the culture within the organi-zation, and making process more impor-tant than task (Greiner, 1972, p. 19).

In 2004 Warner Burke and David Bradford dedicated an entire issue of the Journal of Applied Behavior Science and a book a year later raising the specter of OD’s demise. In the first few pages of the book, they make the point that OD practitioners are not at the table of power, don’t have expertise in business strategy, don’t under-stand the language of business and how profit is made and costs contained, and in the increasingly rare instances where there is an internal OD function, it is too often buried layers deep in the least respected department on the org chart, HR. Yet most OD folks will tell you that they are doing meaningful OD work (Bradford & Burke, 2005, p. 8 –9).

In a cringeworthy description of the people of the stars, Jerry Harvey describes a dying OD by saying, “at various times, she said she did empowering, deconflict-ing, leadershiping, coaching, gridding, sensitizing, feedbacking, spiritualizing, T-grouping, Rolfing, managing, apprais-ing, diversifying, Myers Brigging, renew-ing, life balancing, energizing, storytelling, holistic knowing, mind mapping, group learning, team building, Enneagramming,

re-engineering, and a bunch of other things I can’t recall” (Bradford & Burke, 2005, p. 17).

This isn’t breaking news. “OD has vir-tually disappeared as the title of depart-ments in many organizations. During the late 1970s and 1980s, OD became a bad word in many companies, and this remains so today” (Greiner & Cummings, 2004).

Chris Argyris describes working with 24 OD consultants self-described as “humanistic, interpretive, and existential.” He challenged them to test the validity of their claims, but they said that a humanis-tic perspective did not require independent testing, which Argyris cited as the defen-sive reasoning mindset that is devoid of double loop learning (Arygris, 1990).

Who We Are, and What We Do

In a recent demographic survey of OD practitioners (Shull, Church, & Burke, 2014), the 388 respondents were 50% externals, 39% internals, and 10% academics (5% full time faculty, 4% ten-ured faculty, and 1% researchers.) (More on the 1% problem ahead.)

In general, we are a well-educated bunch. Among the respondents, 60% hold a master’s degree and 31% hold Doctorates.

We are also an aging bunch. A third of us have 20+ years in the field and more than half of us have 16+ years in the field. (See Table 1.) If demography is destiny, this inverted bell curve is not good for the field.

Our answers to the “why did you join the field” question are revealing. In dimin-ishing order, the top 4 reasons we joined the field were to help people, enhance self-awareness, make the world a better place, have social contact and human interaction. Notably, collecting data and generating the-ory didn’t make the top 10, and promot-ing evidence-based practices and using research and statistical skills didn’t make the top 20.

As people of the stars, in practice » We define ourselves and our work with

a label “Organization Development” that means something to us people of the stars, rather than using language understandable to people with their feet on the ground.

» We satisfy ourselves by working at the individual, small group and team lev-els of the organization rather than the larger business unit or whole system levels where there is the most leverage for lasting change.

» We refuse to acknowledge that the majority of OD jobs today are actually HR jobs in talent management, train-ing, and elsewhere, rather than accept-ing the on-the-ground reality that true OD jobs around strategy, structure, business process, and culture change are increasingly extinct.

» We defend qualitative data collection through interviews and focus groups as adequate for collecting data in large organizations, rather than learn and embrace the analytical tools and knowl-edge to conduct surveys and do true large-scale research.

» We revel in our successes in interven-ing in the social systems of our clients, with little or no attempt to intervene and impact the technical or political systems.

» We perpetuate the myth that our work cannot be measured in financial terms, rather than building the muscle to compute return on investment (ROI) calculations that can actually make a financial case for our work.

Those are just a few of the challenges on the “practice” side of theory and practice.

Table1.We are Aging

Percentage, Years in OD

20+ 16–20 11–15 6–10 0–5

Data sourced and used with permission from (Shull et al., 2014)

35%

30%

25%

20%

15%

10%

5%

0%

7ChangeOurName,ChangeOurGame:It’sTimefor“StrategicChange.”

On the theory side » We assert that the field is relevant to

work and organizations in the 21st cen-tury, but the truth is that there is little to no research being done in OD, and what is being done has very little rele-vance to the work that we as OD practi-tioners do.

» We don’t read scholarly writing, and if we do subscribe to journals such as the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science or Academy of Management Review, we often don’t read them, and too often, they are not relevant to our work.

» We ignore the fact that there are very few full-time faculty positions in OD programs. Most programs hire adjunct faculty who bring their work experi-ence to the teaching of OD. While that is mostly good news for stu-dents who strongly prefer more prac-tical and applied OD coursework with tools they can use back on the job on Monday morning, there are too few full-time faculty pursuing legitimate research questions.

» We resist the reality that, with a few notable exceptions, OD graduate pro-grams are struggling. The overall number of OD graduate programs is shrinking. The overall number of OD students is shrinking. Education ben-efits which paid for many OD students are almost a thing of the past. Pro-grams are accepting students who are younger, whose actual work experience is quite limited.

» We ignore the fact that many business schools added change to their OD pro-grams and textbook publishers followed suit (Bushe & Marshak, 2018). OD and change are now intermixed and almost indistinguishable. Try as we might to say that OD is not just about change, in the real world, managers, lead-ers, and our customers can’t really tell the difference.

Meanwhile, directors in OD academic programs complain that their deans and chairs don’t value their programs. In a recent phone call among OD academics and authors, program directors generally agreed when one said quite starkly, “They

just tolerate us, and probably will so, as long as we continue to make money. After that, we’ll be gone, too.” Another agreed, adding “We’re irrelevant in my school. The school doesn’t consider us an asset and they treat us as such.”

The Fault is in Our Stars AND Ourselves?

There are some attributes of OD people writ large that conspire to keep us margin-alized and ineffective.

We help our clients see how they fit into the larger system; we help them see the forest instead of just their own tree. Yet, it is only rarely that we get the helicop-ter view of our own field to see the shape and health of our own forest. At last esti-mate, admittedly some years ago, less than 10% of OD practitioners were members of the OD Network. Approximately 10 times more belonged to regional OD Networks, but after decades of valiant effort, it has been impossible to persuade the regional networks to affiliate with the national Net-work. We have our trees and we’re not going to let go of them.

Imagine SHRM or ATD or any other modern membership association in which the local chapters were independent of the national association, using its name and reputation but with no obligation toward shared members or revenues. Sadly, that is the fragmentation within OD, and we have no way to fix it.

In that regard, we were blessed by our founders in the 1960s with the revolutionary- at-the-time network structure, deliberately loosely coupled, that worked well through the mid-1990s when the OD Network had a monopoly on change agents. But as coaching, HR, training, change management, project management, and other newer disciplines emerged, they formed newer, more modern associations with local chapters tightly coupled to the national organizations, realizing the syn-ergy among them all. They built a forest.

The Danger of Holding On and NOT Letting Go

Our persistence in holding on to our past, stolidly maintaining our independence,

unwilling to align with each other and yield a bit of independence for a greater good, ends up only isolating ourselves to just our tree view of the field. Meanwhile, all the signals from the outside environment are flashing red, shouting at us that the forest is under threat from larger and better orga-nized ecosystems, and that our own forest is on the verge of collapse.

We romanticize our past and we lion-ize the founders of the field, way beyond what the world of OD today requires. Read any history or overview of OD today, and it will necessarily begin with pages of paean to T groups and NTL going back to the 1940s. (As a long-time NTL member and T-group dean myself, I have huge respect for the T-group form and the transforma-tive growth it can enable in today’s world.) But the OD that we practice today is so far removed from the field’s origins that I question our perpetual obeisance to our past, and believe that it keeps us trapped in our allegiance to where we’ve come from, and unable to accept that, for as fond as we are of our origin story, it will not help us create a new future for our forest.

What if we could build a new narrative about organization development that didn’t begin in an era that no one alive today can remember but spoke of improving organi-zation performance and individual develop-ment in our lifetimes? Isn’t that a narrative that would serve us better?

On a Smaller Scale

Try facilitating a meeting of facilitators or a work conference for OD people. Herding cats is one of the nicer metaphors. Stam-peding mules often feels closer to the truth. Participants challenge the design, question the agenda, undermine the meeting leader. At its most benign, this is about improv-ing the experience for everyone. At its more covert, it is about challenging the leader-ship of the meeting in a battle for primacy and control. Ironically, we ask our clients to “trust the process,” and yet we do not grant that same grace when we ourselves are in leadership roles.

We are torn between competing impulses, wanting on one hand to be included in top level decision making,

ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT REVIEW Vol. 51 No. 3 20198

working with the dominant coalition, and wanting our work to have an impact ver-sus on the other hand wanting to maintain our boundaries and stay at the margin. We have mistakenly told ourselves that a sys-tem can only be truly seen from the out-side, and that once inside, the system has coopted us. Tell that to the many internal OD practitioners who are greatly valued for the depth of their knowledge and insights into the operations and culture of their own organizations.

We are counter dependent and resist authority. Having administered the FIRO-B to OD practitioners and students for the last 30 years, there is a large concentra-tion of extremely low (0–1) scores on the 9-point scale for Wanted Control (wC), which is about our comfort in situations defined by others. While fierce indepen-dence has its merits, it makes it difficult to work with or under others, and an unwill-ingness to be guided or managed by others (Minahan & Norlin, 2013).

That counter-dependence creates resis-tance to authority and undermines the very efforts the field needs to consolidate and advance itself. We are relational people, but we don’t like to join. We preach collabora-tion in our client systems and yet we are unwilling to collaborate well enough to cre-ate large scale change among ourselves or the field. We work in ones and twos because it allows us the greatest flexibility and absolves us of fitting in with others.

We counsel our coaching clients to work constructively with their bosses, to delight their bosses, to see the larger pic-ture, to understand the context of their work, and to shift from analysis to action. Ironically, around our field, the cob-bler’s children have bare feet, the doctor’s kids are sick, and we are unable to follow our advice.

If we could manage to get out of our own way and pull together toward a com-mon vision for the field—which is exactly what we ask of our clients—could we pos-sibly see our work contributing to the over-all organization and effectiveness of the field AND the individual development of us as practitioners?

A Failing Duality

In some ways, we’ve planted the seeds of failure for ourselves by holding on to either/or thinking about OD. Appropri-ately so, we teach about the differences between content and process. Task and main-tenance. Work and play. We want OD people to be clear about the differences and make choices appropriate to the situation.

But that same dualistic thinking has brought us to other forced choices that are not as clear and not as helpful. We are caught in the tension between touchy-feely versus bottom line oriented. Airy-fairy ver-sus nitty gritty (Marshak, 2005). Humanistic versus business oriented. The worker versus

the man. Labor versus management. People versus profits. Individual versus team. The needs of the one versus the needs of the many. As a field, we talk a lot about polarities and how to avoid either/or thinking, but in truth, the world, and our work is riddled with them.

But What If We Could Make This a Both/And?

What if we could make the field about improving organizational performance AND enhancing individual development?

One of the best statements of both/and thinking in OD is a combination of The-ory E change and Theory O change (Beer & Nohria, 2000). The authors argue that real, true change only occurs when both Theory E change and Theory O change are present. (See Table 2.)

Many OD practitioners will find the elements of Theory E change offensive: maximize shareholder value, manage change from the top, motivate via finan-cial incentives, and expert consultants who bring solutions to the organization.

Most OD folks would find more com-fort in Theory O, which is about developing organizational capabilities, encourag-ing bottoms up change, building a corpo-rate culture around employees, motivating via commitment, and consultants who support management in making their own decisions.

Table2.Dimensions of Change

Dimensions of Change Theory E Theory O Theories E and O Combined

Goals Maximizeshareholdervalue Developorganizationalcapabilities

Explicitlyembracetheparadoxbetweeneconomicvalueandorganizationalcapability

Leadership Managechangefromthetopdown

Encourageparticipationfromthebottomup

Setdirectionfromthetopandengagethepeoplebelow

Focus Emphasizestructureandsystems

Buildupcorporateculture:emplyees’behaviorandattitudes

Focussimultaneouslyonthehard(structuresandsystems)andthesoft(corporateculture)

Process Planandestablishprograms Experimentandevolve Planforspontaneity

Reward System Motivatethroughfinancialincentives

Motivatethroughcommitment—usepayasfairexchange

Useincentivestoreinforcechangebutnottodriveit

Use of Consultants Consultantsanalyzeproblemsandshapesolutions

Consultantssupportmanagementinshapingtheirownsolutions

Consultantsareexpertresourceswhoempoweremployees

Reprinted with permission from Beer and Nohria (2000), page 137

9ChangeOurName,ChangeOurGame:It’sTimefor“StrategicChange.”

The both/and between Theory E and Theory O, which is where solid OD folks actually do their work, explicitly embraces the tension between economic value and organizational capability, sets direction from the top and engages the people below, focuses simultaneously on the hard struc-tures and systems and the softer corporate culture, uses incentives to reinforce change but not drive it, and works with consultants who are expert resources who empower people. That would make our work about both organizational effectiveness AND individual development.

Dear Past: Thank You for All the Lessons. Dear Future: We are Ready

So, what is happening in the world that is worthy of our attention as a field? That is worthy of our talent? What opportunities will be missed if we just disappeared? What is the stake in the ground that we will stand and defend?

There are dozens of reasons in the real world to be pessimistic about our future. Climate change, income inequality, addi-tional wealth depletion among people of

color since 2008, disappearing manufac-turing jobs, gridlock in elected legislatures, the declining birth rate, international ten-sions and trade wars, rising nationalism, tariffs, threats of war, totalitarian tactics among leaders are among them.

Yet, aren’t these the very problems that need our skills the most? Aren’t these the greatest challenges of our time? Isn’t this exactly what calls forth our very hearts?

´The modern OD movement, like its founders, must begin to engage with and be galvanized by the big questions of the day . . . convincing evidence for its impact, and indeed the impact of any approach to change, is patchy and inconsistent. Yet there has never been a time when the big questions were more important. The world is running out of natural resources and food, climate change is threatening to destroy the planet, and organizations in large and important sections of our econ-omies seem to have decided that ethics, morality and laws do not apply to them” (Burnes, 2004; Burnes & Cooke, 2012).

If the research by Shull et all (2014) mentioned above is correct, then “helping

others” and “making the world a better place” is exactly what fires us up.

We have much to learn from those who think about the future. The jobs study by the World Economic Forum identi-fies “organization development specialist” among the top 10 new roles needed in the future (The Future of Jobs Report 2018, 2018). Many of those jobs will be needed in emerging economies and in places like Asia and Eastern Europe, which raises huge challenges for OD graduate schools and certificate programs which are largely located in the US and UK. But despite the challenge, the opportunity is there.

Many futurists are talking now about the Information Age as the fourth big wave in economic and social develop-ment. Schroyer (1974) and Toffler (1980) did some early thinking about the evolu-tion of economies and societies. Longtime colleague and thinking partner Fred Nick-ols has extended their thinking in “Beyond Post-Industrial Society: A Fourth Era?” (See Table 3.) The very language in his future is all about the things that good, solid OD brings to the world: blending networks, partnering, integrating, trust, climate as a

Table3.Waves in Economic and Social Development

Used with permission (Nichols, 2019).

Daniel Bell

Alvin Toffler

The Economy

Core Process

Work

Outputs

Key Ingredient

Key Person

Controlling Factor

Locus of Conflict

Regional

Barter

Extracting

Raw Materials

Labor

Farmer

Climate

Nature

Global

Communications

Thinking

Innovations

Knowledge

Worker

Computer

People

National

Commerce

Manufacturing

Finished Goods

Capital

Financier

Clock

Machinery

Networks

Partnering

Integrating

Partnerships

Trust

Integrator

Climate

Nature

Pre-industrial

First Wave

Era 1

Industrial

Second Wave

Era 2

Post-Industrial

Third Wave

Era 3

Fred Nichols

Matt Minahan

Era 4

© Fred Nichols 2019

ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT REVIEW Vol. 51 No. 3 201910

controlling factor, and nature as the locus of future conflict.

In their review of 30 years of research in OD and change, Bill Passmore and Dick Woodman (2017) identify 5 major shifts in the world that should affect our practice of OD: » Motivation: from transitory needs being

affected by immediate conditions and rewards, to not just one need but want-ing it all (e.g., personal freedom) with little acceptance of positional authority.

» Leadership: from the great-man leader, to nonhierarchical, informal, and shared leadership.

» Teamwork: from small, face-to-face groups with a shared goal, to virtual, larger, and less stable memberships.

» Organization design: from authority relationships with boxes and connect-ing arrows, to holocracy, team organiza-tions, and network-centric.

» Organization development: from planned change with steps and phases, to facing multiple, complex changes simultaneously with networks and nominal organizations, and optimizing action learning (Burke, 2018).

Are We Up to It? Are We Up to Us?

It certainly won’t be easy to keep reach-ing for the stars and to get our feet on the ground. But just because we haven’t doesn’t mean we can’t. Or won’t. Or shouldn’t. We have to look at what we believe about ourselves, what we believe about each other, what we believe about OD, and what we believe about the world to fully answer these questions.

So far, we have demonstrated little of what Gervase Bushe identifies as the crite-ria for creating a “great organization:”1. The more developed a system, the more

aware of itself it is; it can talk to itself about itself.

2. The more developed the system, the less is it driven by reactive, unconscious emotions, motivations, and cognitive frameworks and the more decisions and actions are based on reason, ratio-nality, and cognitive complexity.

3. The more developed the system, the more it is able to actualize its potential (G. R. Bushe, 2017).

But just because we haven’t yet, doesn’t mean we can’t. Or won’t. Or shouldn’t.

If We Were Consulting to Us:

What would we say to ourselves about this dilemma, and what would we advise our-selves about this?

First, get the whole system into the con-versation. There are a variety of ways to do that today, including surveys, focus groups, online fora, conferences, meetings, telecon-ferences, etc. This process of creating the forest view is already in motion, also in a variety of ways.

One such process has been underway for 2 years. A few friends and colleagues have created a series of three annual face to face meetings called The Gathering, bringing together a diverse group of prac-titioners, students, scholars, activists and authors, to talk about the current state of the field and to help chart its future. We have been intentional about including lead-ers and members from the OD Network, Academy of Management, International Society of Organization and Change, and authors, thought leaders, and practitioners around the world. There is more at www.odgathering.com.

In preparation for the 2019 Gather-ing, there are four Circles at work now, on Values for the Future; Vision, Essence, and Critical Needs for the Future; Consolidating Definitions of OD; and OD Competencies. We hope that each Circle will have refined its work so that we can find enough con-sensus and common ground to bring them forward to the field in a broad consulta-tive process that includes the many diverse voices in the field.

This may not be the best, and it cer-tainly shouldn’t be the only, efforts to build bridges across boundaries within the field, but it is underway, two-thirds com-pleted, generating high quality conversa-tions, building relationships, and getting work done.

We would be even better served if there were also a solid consensus about the research needed in the field. Six top-ics identified almost 20 years ago seem even more important now than they did 10 years ago: virtual teams, conflict resolu-tion, work group effectiveness, social net-work analysis, trust, and intractable global, religious, and environmental conflict (Bun-ker, Alban, & Lewicki, 2004). But the OD doctoral programs are marginal in most universities. We do not have a cadre of full-time faculty who are conducting ongoing research on OD and its effectiveness. In most programs, a full-time director or two are consumed with recruitment of students and adjunct faculty and program admin-istration; they are too busy and too few to conduct research or write. As a result, the research done by doctoral students in the field is very “pracademic” and, while use-ful, does not easily contribute to a larger, systemic body of knowledge.

But there are stirrings among the trees. In 2007 OD program directors started meeting as a small caucus at the Academy of Management and OD Net-work. By 2009, they created the OD Edu-cation Association (ODEA) (https://www.odnetwork.org/general/custom.asp?page= ODEA) and included all of their students and faculty as members. By 2010 they jointly created the Essential Elements (https://www.odnetwork.org/page/Essential Elements) for OD graduate school curricula, the 12 topics that are considered indispens-able to the education of future OD practi-tioners (Minahan, 2014).

The OD Network has taken a huge step toward the forest view. It worked with doz-ens of volunteers, input from every major OD organization, and almost 900 respon-dents from around the world to create the Global OD Practice Framework (https://www.odnetwork.org/page/globalframework), a 5-part competency wheel. Some have criti-cized its business-oriented language as not being OD enough, but it is generating the hoped-for response of upping the ante on who we are and what we have to offer to our clients and the world (Minahan, 2018).

I had the good fortune in April of this year to tell the origin stories of the ODEA, the Essential Elements, and the Global OD

11ChangeOurName,ChangeOurGame:It’sTimefor“StrategicChange.”

Practice Framework at a first-ever meet-ing of UK organizations teaching, training, and certifying OD practitioners. Convened by long-time colleague and friend Mee-Yan Cheung-Judge, these were graduate pro-grams, certificate programs, private sector organizations with their own OD mod-els, three large public sector agencies with thousands of OD folks, NTL Europe, the OD Network Europe, The Tavistock Insti-tute, and a few scholars and research-ers. Some knew each other, most didn’t. Some were collaborators, most were com-petitors. And yet, within an hour of meet-ing each other for the first time, all shared their models and theories and frameworks, printed on posters of all to see and ear-nestly agreed that there was more to gain by working together than working alone. It was also gratifying to see that several are using the Global OD Practice Framework for the training and self-assessment of OD practitioners in the UK.

There are important glimpses of the forest. It’s a good start. And there’s more to do.

Second, get serious about the business of business. We need to get serious about it. Not enough OD consultants can tell you about the budget, revenue sources, or oper-ating income in their client systems. Know-ing how many people work in the unit is the primary metric that many of us use, but until we grasp the basic dynamics of the organization as a whole—growing, contracting, centralizing, decentralizing, employees, contractors, payroll, contingent, full time, part time, benefits, no benefits, individual incentives, group incentives, earnings before taxes, return to sharehold-ers, engagement of stakeholders, relation-ship to the outside environment, boundary porous, boundary impermeable, etc. we limit our capacity to influence organiza-tional leadership and to support them in the larger changes that really matter to them.

David Bradford addresses this in his 2006 video message (https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_+embedded&v=5AbB3VEy1BM). We need to know and under-stand the core business functions and income dynamics of the organization so

that we can strengthen the links and align-ment among strategy, structure, and busi-ness operations.

There are tons of consulting firms that provide “solutions” to these business issues and improve organizational performance. Their strength is intervening in the techni-cal system. BUT, if we knew more about the business and its key operational chal-lenges, we could speak credibly to improv-ing organizational performance AND individual development, intervening in the whole socio-technical system, by building capacity using high engagement methods. That is the both/and that we bring to the world and is what differentiates us from traditional consulting firms. But we need to get smarter about the business dynam-ics and speak the language of our clients, rather than trying to convert them to ours.

Third, get over ourselves. While there is a general pessimism about the future of the field among some in the US, we must admit that while our forest may be in decline in the US, there are branches, trees, and a whole ecosystem of OD that is springing up around the world.

In addition to the meeting of OD organizations in the UK, there are OD programs and institutes across Europe, including an OD Network Europe and a branch of NTL in Europe that continues to flourish and offer programs while its US based headquarters struggles to offer it labs. Longtime friend and OD colleague John Scherer has been working in Poland and writes that in central Europe, his firm is experiencing more demand than ever for OD/OE programs and their mini-certifica-tion program called The Leading Change course (J. Scherer, personal communica-tion, April 20, 2019).

There are at least half a dozen schools, consultants, and entrepreneurs starting up OD training programs in China (Minahan, 2019). There are several in Japan. There are OD graduate programs in the Philippines, Thailand, Mexico, and elsewhere. The Asia OD Network has been expanding across the region for a decade now.

We also have to acknowledge that “Organization development practitio-ners are no longer the sole proprietors of

organization development knowledge. Hav-ing more educated clients is a very good thing. Supporting them to increase their levels of OD capability requires us as OD practitioners to think about how we need to expand our value proposition” (Sanchez, 2013). This forces us to consider that build-ing capacity is a key element of the work that are doing in organizations and making it explicit in our contracting and market-ing conversations.

Fourth, get serious about impact evalua-tion. We need to evaluate and speak to the economic and financial impact of our work better than we have in the past. Every self-respecting consulting firm can tell a cli-ent what a project will cost, and what it will save. The language of business and organi-zations is the language of results: metrics and proof.

This is the result of our inability to speak about results: “Many organiza-tions stopped saying they did OD because the label (and maybe the entire field) had become a cliché. Furthermore, a lot of OD groups in organizations hadn’t produced a hell of a lot of useful, lasting change that people could point to” (Porras & Bradford, 2004).

Sure, there are many outcomes from our work that can’t be monetized. How do you put a dollar value on an improved organizational climate? Or who has influ-ence in the system and how they earned it, and who is being marginalized in the system and what is causing that? But we shouldn’t be selling just improved organi-zational climate or tuned-up teams or more effective executives.

Our work should also include exami-nation of the organization’s meeting pat-terns, how leadership spends its time, who makes decisions and how long it takes to make them, the basics of the unit’s busi-ness process, how and where things get stuck, how incentives work or don’t . . . all of which can be measured, which means they can monetized, which means we should be working toward them, which means we should be speaking with our cli-ents about them, before, during, and after our projects.

ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT REVIEW Vol. 51 No. 3 201912

We should be able to make a fact-based argument for the value of our work. Our tool box of ice breakers and two-by-two matrices is not enough. Our work needs to withstand the same cost-bene-fit analysis that any organizational invest-ment receives.

We need much better tools and meth-ods for evaluating the impact of our work and making the case for ourselves and our field. Research done on the Socio-Eco-nomic Approach to Management (SEAM) among 1300 organizations at ISEOR, the Socio-Economic Institute of Firms and

Organizations affiliated with the school of management of Lyon, France, points to three variables: a cyclical improvement pro-cess, permanent management tools, and periodic political and strategic decisions for returning the full investment of an inter-vention in as few as three months, an aver-age of 12 months, and many multiples when pursued over time. Their under lying belief is that the principles of Frederick Taylor, Henri Fayol, and Max Weber are a destructive virus that infects organizations (Conbere, Heorhiadi, & Cristallini, 2012).

Further, “OD should never be on the receiving end of the ROI question. We should be the ones asking it. We should initiate the conversation on this subject. And we should initiate it at the outset, when the program is being considered. Moving from the ROI approach to the Inquiry Approach requires OD practitio-ners to think like leaders, ask challenging questions, and make decisions in the face of uncertainty. It requires us to look at how our program (or any program) fits with the strategy of the business” (Kruse, 2010).

We need to be willing to work on change that is pragmatic and sometimes directive and top down, not just principled, collaborative, and bottom up. We need to acknowledge that power is a necessary component of organizational life, and we need to align ourselves with the priorities and values of the CEO and leadership. And, if we cannot, we should walk away from the work.

Fifth, radically change our thinking about OD and HR. While we’ve been focused on our own trees, we haven’t noticed that a

new species is now in our forest, the HR profession. As HR has grown and matured as a discipline, it has realized that OD is what HR wants to become. In just about every HR competency framework, OD skills are at the top of a ladder that gener-ally begin with HR generalist. In between are jobs such as HR officer or business partner. There are some jobs around career development, recruitment, talent manage-ment, and leadership development.

Of course, these jobs are all well filled by candidates with a background in OD. But that does not make them OD jobs. The systems view that we bring to the world, coupled with our commitment to organi-zational performance and individual develop-ment, makes OD people great candidates for these jobs. But in the end, there are not really OD jobs. They are a well-traveled route to OD jobs, but they are not OD jobs.

Even in the cases where the HR func-tion does create a real OD job, it is too often undermined by its very location on the organization chart. Even though there are some strong and effectively-led HR organizations, overall the HR function is

often the least well-regarded function in the organization.

Even deeper, though, is that the fun-damental purpose of the OD function is in conflict with that of HR. The core mission of HR is to provide staff, reduce labor costs to the lowest possible level at which people will work, reduce risks, and avoid litigation. In that kind of environment, it is almost impossible to serve the core mission of OD, which is improve the effectiveness of the organization, maximize the potential of human beings and their contributions to the organization, align strategy to struc-ture to business processes to behavior in an effective corporate culture, take responsible risks, and model humanistic values in the workplace (M. Minahan, 2010).

Sixth, radically change our language. To be fluent in the business operations of organi-zations we need to understand the concepts and vocabulary of business management in organizations. We need to speak its operational language of growth, downsiz-ing, opportunity, risk, cyclical and counter-cyclical dynamics, not just the humanistic language of participation, collaboration, and empowerment.

Even in our earliest years, there were some who got this right. Speaking of Dick Beckhard and the principals of Block, Petrella, and Weisbord, Harvey Horn-stein said, “They were acceptable (sic) and got in the door with executives because they spoke, and could identify with, busi-ness as well as larger human purpose. They were not ‘beads and sandals’ guys” (Goldberg, 2019).

Really good internal OD practitioners know this very well. They have figured out that they have to defend the organization’s investment in them on a regular basis. They can tell you things about the system and how it operates that no one else can. Their background and training in systems dynamics helps them see the forest better than the tree people in their own organi-zations. In this regard, internal exem-plars have already figured out how to reach for the stars AND keep their feet on the ground at the same time.

A shift in our own language would help as well. We externals say we have a

We should be able to make a fact-based argument for the value of our work. Our tool box of ice breakers and two-by-two matrices is not enough. Our work needs to withstand the same cost-benefit analysis that any organizational invest-ment receives. We need much better tools and methods for evaluating the impact of our work and making the case for ourselves and our field.

13ChangeOurName,ChangeOurGame:It’sTimefor“StrategicChange.”

consulting “practice,” which resonates with the non-commercial elements of a doc-tor’s or lawyer’s office. It also has conno-tations of the doctor-patient relationships and diagnoses. If we changed our language to consulting “business,” and thought of ourselves and our work with a bottom-line orientation, we might be able to more easily relate to the bottom-line orienta-tion of our clients. A shift in these direc-tions would help us expand our reach and our impact into the fullest range of pub-lic and private sector entities, and help get us off the postage stamp we have created for ourselves, bounded by values and prin-ciples and shoulds and should nots and wills and would nots and our own chosen blind spots.

International OD consultants already get this shift. In interviews and surveys with global OD consultants, business con-cerns were the top 5 rankings of the cur-rent state, and the top 8 rankings of the future state, including enhanced produc-tivity, bottom line results, and profitabil-ity, increasing efficiency or effectiveness, enhancing competitive advantage, and pro-moting quality of products and services. “For the global OD consultant, the concern for business effectiveness is . . . both/and, not an either/or (Yaeger, 2002, p.17).

Seventh, take ourselves as seriously as we want our clients to take us. In our commit-ment to be nonjudgmental and to have a big tent and to promote diversity, we have not demanded enough rigor in the field. I have heard dozens of people say, “Yes, I used to work in the line, but this OD job is better.” When I ask how they learned OD, too often there are no answers. I’d love to hear, “I’m working on a Masters degree,” or “I’m working on the NTL OD Certifi-cate,” or “I’m in an action set,” or “I’m understudying our external consultant.” Instead, I get blank stares or “I Googled it.”

Change management, coaching, proj-ect management, HR, training all have competency models and organizations that certify. Yet we in OD in the US are late to the table. We have much to learn from our colleagues in the UK, where certifying bod-ies themselves are certified, and those cre-dentials are taken as seriously in the field

of OD and they are in every other profes-sion. We have much to learn from the mod-ern organizations such as SHRM, ACMP, ICF, and other associations that have formed around our field.

So, while people of the stars were gazing inward, the people of the ground were building organizations, competency models, and certification programs that meet the needs of their members. And we were not.

I remember hearing from HR VPs in a focus group at the OD Network confer-ence in 2005 that what they really wanted

from the OD Network was to know which of their HR people were good enough to be trusted alone with a line VP. They wanted the Network to certify their people.

When explored with the OD Network’s boards of 2005–2010, the answers were, “We don’t do that.” “We want to be accept-ing of all people.” “These criteria would exclude even Edie Seashore, we can’t do that.” “That wouldn’t be inclusive.” “That would create inequities in our own sys-tem.” “There would be haves and have nots.” The idea died for a decade.

We are watching the Teslas of our world—ACMP, SHRM, ICF—intrude on our space while we cling to the Prius that we’ve known and loved for all of these years, pretending not to notice that sales are declining (in 2017 less than half of 2012), sales of electric vehicles are rapidly increas-ing, and prices for used hybrids are falling. There similar signals from the market about our own field we ignore at our own peril.

Finally, retire “organization development.” Like a well-worn car or pair of shoes, we’ve become very attached to this label. It warms our hearts. It calls forth echoes of Kurt Lewin and Marv Weisbord and Ed Schein and Edie Seashore and Leland Brad-ford and Billie Alban and Bethel Maine and Herb Shepard and all the great women and men upon whose shoulders we stand.

But other than to us, those two words mean nothing in the real world. We have no currency with anyone except ourselves. We laugh when asked how we explain our work to our parents and friends. It’s a bit

of humor for us. It is our inside joke. But it is also an embarrassment that we have no way to describe succinctly what we bring to the world and what we have to offer to organizations.

Jerry Porras got here 15 years ago. “The term OD became irrelevant to me . . . OD is everything and as a result OD is nothing . . . it became whatever OD consul-tants were doing. So, organization effective-ness became the in terms. It then evolved to organizational transformation, then organizational learning and so on” (Por-ras & Bradford, 2004, p. 395). Porras goes on to say that “ . . . OD has become an out-of-date fad in the minds of many manag-ers. We might be better off just abandoning the term OD. What we’re all interested in doing is helping organizations to change, to become more effective along a wide vari-ety of dimensions. Let’s focus on that” (Bradford & Burke, 2005, p. 63).

Not only does the term have no cur-rency in the real world, whatever currency

. . . retire “organization development.” Like a well-worn car or pair of shoes, we’ve become very attached to this label. It warms our hearts. . . . But other than to us, those two words mean nothing in the real world. We have no currency with anyone except ourselves. We laugh when asked how we explain our work to our parents and friends. It’s a bit of humor for us. It is our inside joke. But it is also an embarrassment that we have no way to describe succinctly what we bring to the world and what we have to offer to organizations.

ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT REVIEW Vol. 51 No. 3 201914

it ever had has eroded in the face of coach-ing, project management, change man-agement, diversity and inclusion work. In that regard, these patches of forest are growing different trees and creating differ-ent forests.

Our clients already know this and are taking action on it. There are very few OD departments anymore. The few that sur-vive are mainly called organizational effec-tiveness, or organizational performance, or performance improvement, or something related. One client organization recently abolished its OD function, moved it into the Office of the President, recommis-sioned it to a broader role, increased its budget and staffing commensurately, and renamed it “Change, Delivery, and Innova-tion.” When you think about it, that means much more to that organization than does “OD.”

What if we declared success? Accepted the fact there are no boundaries to our field. That these other disciplines have hol-lowed out the core of our work, leaving not much of a forest, and only individual trees? What if we accepted that the wonderful his-tory and legacy left to us by our founders just isn’t relevant in today’s world?

What would we be without our name? Would we have to shift our identity the way the training organization shifted from ASTD to ATD to reflect their new direc-tion? The way that AT&T became seven regional phone companies under different names, and then re-consolidated as Veri-zon. And then expanded itself to take on an entirely new wireless business. As the new and revitalized AT&T did and then recre-ated itself into a cable company, and then a content delivery and distribution system with the purchase of Direct TV. Or Dis-ney’s acquisition of the Fox movie studios? Or the pending sale of their regional sports networks to Sinclair?

If Not OD, Then What?

In a wonderful phone call with long time friend and colleague and former execu-tive director of the OD Network, Peter Nor-lin and I pushed around a variety of terms in different combinations. It was a kind of Mad Libs, for anyone who remembers

Steve Allen. In the end, Peter put together the two words that stopped the phone call in its tracks. Strategic Change. Like OD, both words mean something individu-ally. But together they have much more meaning than organization and develop-ment together.

Everyone knows what a strategy is. Everyone strives to be more strategic. Everyone realizes that requires work. The words strategy and strategic have more meaning and currency today than at any time in the history of organizations. The word also evokes a bigger scale, a farther horizon, a larger context to the work that we do and the change that we want to sup-port. It connotes a strong connection to the organization’s, and our, larger purpose.

Likewise, everyone knows what change means. It is swirling around every facet of our lives. We have to acknowledge that our field has no Immunity to Change (Lahey & Kegan, 2009). We don’t have the privilege to exempt ourselves from the very impera-tives of evolution and outside environment that govern life in every living and orga-nizational system. In fact, helping them cope with this very imperative is why they hire us.

To Do List:

If we are serious about undertaking these changes, things to do include: » Look for more ways to engage ourselves

and each other in the ongoing dialogue about the future of the field.

» Revisit the values upon which the field is based. So much about the world is different than it was 70 years ago that a thorough examination and possible re-boot of what we have cherished as our OD values is in order.

» Educate ourselves in the language and business dynamics of organizations. That means online courses, community college courses, workshops, seminars, concurrent sessions at conferences.

» Align with people and organizations who know how to count things and measure impact and return on invest-ment. The International Society for Per-formance Improvement (ISPI) (https://www.ispi.org/)is a good place to start.

The International Program for Develop-ment Evaluation Training (https://ipdet.org/) is a good place to learn. Take their training programs, go to their confer-ences. Invite them to come to your con-ference. As it happens, they need our systems view of the world just as much as we need their evaluation view of the world.

» Study business dynamics. This does not require an MBA, but it does require a bit of effort to learn the language of leadership and organizational dynamics and how to read a financial statement.

» Reach out to the change management, project management, and training orga-nizations to build alliances.

» Change our questions from “why are there no OD jobs anymore” to “how can we advocate for what the world really needs, a strategic approach to change.”

» Adopt the language of today’s world and accept that Strategic Change is what we’re all about.

These will help us get to the both/and where we can still hug our trees AND see the forest view. They will also help us reach for the stars and get our feet solidly on the ground. They will help us deliver organizational performance AND individual development well into the future in a world desperately in need of both.

Author’s note: This article draws heavily on previously published Minahan, M., & Norlin, P. (2013). Edging toward the cen-ter: An opportunity to align our values, our practices, and the purpose of our work. OD Practitioner, 45(4), 2–8.

References

Beer, M., & Nohria, N. (2000). Cracking the code of change. Harvard Business Review, 78(3), 133–141.

Bradford, D. L., & Burke, W. W. (2005). Reinventing organization development: New approaches to change in organiza-tions. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Bunker, B. B., Alban, B. T., & Lewicki, R. J. (2004). Ideas in currency and OD practice: Has the well gone dry? The Journal of Applied Behavioral

15ChangeOurName,ChangeOurGame:It’sTimefor“StrategicChange.”

Science, 40(4), 403–422. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021886304270372

Burke, W. W. (2018). The rise and fall of the growth of organization development: What now? Consulting Psychology Jour-nal: Practice and Research, 70(3), 186–206. https://doi.org/10.1037/cpb0000116

Burnes, B. (2004). Managing change: A stra-tegic approach to organisational dynamics. Pearson Education.

Burnes, B., & Cooke, B. (2012). The past, present and future of organization development: taking the long view. Human Relations, 65(11), 1395–1429.

Bushe, G. R. (2017). Where organisation development thrives. Winner of the Val Hammond Research Competition, Roffey Park Institute.

Bushe, G. R., & Marshak, R. J. (2018). Valu-ing both the journey and the destina-tion in organization development. In D. W. Jamieson, A. H. Church, & J. D. Vogelsang (Eds.), Enacting Values-Based Change (pp. 87–97). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69590-7_6

Conbere, J., Heorhiadi, A., & Cristallini, V. (2012). The key to SEAM’s effectiveness, 1–7. Retrieved from http://www.seaminc.com/wp-content/uploads/The-Keys-to-SEAMs-effectiveness-6-121.pdf

Goldberg, M. (2019). The rise and fall of OD—and two paths forward. Organiza-tion Development Review, 51(2), 14–20.

Greiner, L. (1972). Red flags in organiza-tion development. Business Horizons, 15(3), 17–24.

Greiner, L., & Cummings, T. (2004). Wanted: OD more alive than dead. Jour-nal of Applied Behavioral Science, 40(4), 374–393.

Kruse, A. (2010). The ROI trap: How we got into it and how we can escape. OD Practitioner, 42(3), 48–52.

Lahey, L. L., & Kegan, R. (2009). Immu-nity to change. Harvard Business School Publishing.

Marshak, R. J. (2005). Contemporary chal-lenges to the philosophy and prac-tice of organization development. In D. L. Bradford & W. W. Burke (Eds.) pp. 19–42.

Minahan, M. (2014). ODEA: An idea whose time is here. OD Practitioner, 46(3), 22–26.

Minahan, M. (2019). The exciting future of OD in China, 2019. Organization Devel-opment Review, 51(1), 17–21.

Minahan, M, & Norlin, P. (2013). Edging toward the center: An opportunity to align our values, our practices, and the purpose of our work. OD Practitioner, 45(4), 2–8.

Minahan, Matt. (2018). Finally! Global OD Competencies. OD Practitioner, 50(3), 19–22.

Nickols, F. (2019, April). Beyond Post-Industrial Society: A Fourth Era? Retrieved April 11, 2019, from Knowledge Worker Column by Fred Nickols website: https://www.nickols.us/AFourthEra.pdf

Pasmore, W. A., & Woodman, R. W. (2017). The future of research and practice in organizational change and development. In Research in Organizational Change and Develop-ment: Vol. 25. Research in Organiza-tional Change and Development (Vol. 25, pp. 1–32). https://doi.org/10.1108/S0897-301620170000025001

Porras, J. L., & Bradford, D. L. (2004). A historical view of the future of OD: An interview with Jerry Porras. The Jour-nal of Applied Behavioral Science, 40, 392–402.

Sanchez, M. (2013). Maturing Toward Enterprise Organization Develop-ment Capability. OD Practitioner, 45(4), 49–54.

Scherer, J. (2019, April 20). Update on The Gathering, Call #2.

Schroyer, T. (1974). Daniel Bell, “The Coming of Post-Industrial Society.” Retrieved April 11, 2019, from https://philpapers.org/rec/SCHDBT

Shull, A., Church, A., & Burke, W. (2014). Something old, something new: Research on the practice and values of OD. OD Practitioner, 46(4), 23–30.

The Future of Jobs Report 2018. (2018, September 17). Retrieved April 11, 2019, from World Economic Forum website:

https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-future-of-jobs-report-2018/

Toffler, A. (1980). The third wave. 1st ed. Retrieved from http://agris.fao.org/agris-search/search.do?recordID=US19820752906

Yaeger, T. F. (2002). The core value of OD revisited: A compass for global and international organization develop-ment. OD Practitioner, 30(1), 14–19.

Matt Minahan, Ed.D.,ispresi-dentofMM&Associates,aninternationalconsultingfirmspecializinginstrategy,structure,organizationdesign,andculturechange.HeteachesintheMSODprogramatAmericanUniversityandisaguestlectureratBenedic-tineUniversity,CabriniUniversity,andotherdoctoralprograms.HeservedontheBoardofTrusteesoftheODNetworkfrom2009until2015,andwasvice-,co-,andchairoftheboardfrom2012–2015.Heisalongtimemember,andformerboardmemberandT-groupdeanatNTLInstitute.Hecanbereachedatmatt@minahangroup.com.

ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT REVIEW Vol. 51 No. 3 201916

RESPONSE

The Minahan Manifesto

ByRobertJ.Marshak

I have several different thoughts and reac-tions to what Matt Minahan has offered to the OD community. I don’t think they reflect a consistent theme as much as reflections from differing perspectives that I hold. I offer them as a contribution and perhaps further stimulus to the dialogue and action agenda Matt is inviting.

A manifesto nailed on the door of the OD community. First, a bravo to Mina-han for being brave enough and auda-cious enough to put what is nothing less than a comprehensive manifesto in front of us. I agree with much of what he has written and also differ with some of it (see for example, Jamieson & Marshak, 2018). However, the specifics don’t matter to me as much as appreciating someone who encapsulates a very broad range of critiques and concerns about OD as a field and then challenges the OD community to respond.

We have met the enemy and they are us. Borrowing from the great sage Pogo we are invited to look in the mirror and rec-ognize some of our foibles and failings as a professional community. Given the intended audience I also wonder if some-where, somehow including what the com-munity has done well—our virtues and contributions—could have been introduced to balance the presentation a little bit and also remind us that we have abilities and

resilience to deal with the issues Matt enu-merates. At the extreme, after reading all the inadequacies of OD practitioners one is left wondering a bit if a wake-up call has much hope of success. A brief discussion or reminder of what we as individuals and a community are capable of might provide more encouragement.

The news of our death is greatly exag-gerated. I am not Mark Twain but the demise of OD unless it addresses many of the identical issues raised by Minahan has been predicted for decades. For exam-ple, thirty years ago Michael Beer wrote in this journal, “In my view the field of OD is dying” and “OD is in need of redefini-tion” (Beer, 1989, pp. 11-12). Yet somehow OD lives on. How can that be? My answer paradoxically accepts both life and death. I am increasingly of the mind that OD as it was originally practiced in the 1950s-1970s has largely atrophied or “died” except in the memories of old timers and gatekeep-ers like me. At the same time newer ideas and practices have flourished including approaches that many of us might consider OD, but whose adherents know as some-thing else and may never have even heard of OD. So, OD is dead. Long live OD.

A rose by any other name. I’ve been a practitioner of OD for 45 years now. For at least the past 40 years there have been calls to change the name from “OD” to some-thing else. I recall “organization effective-ness” was in vogue right after I started as an internal. Then, and perhaps now, the desire was to get away from the stigma

Respondents:

RobertJ.MarshakDavidCoghlanRebeccaSlocumGervaseR.BusheDavidW.JamiesonJohnConbere&AllaHeorhiadiYabomeGilpin-JacksonPeterF.NorlinLMee-YanCheungJudge

Responses to Matt Minahan’s Call for Strategic Change

“First,abravotoMinahanforbeingbraveenoughandaudaciousenoughtoputwhatisnothinglessthanacomprehensivemanifestoinfrontofus....However,thespecificsdon’tmattertomeasmuchasappreciatingsomeonewhoencapsulatesaverybroadrangeofcritiquesandconcernsaboutODasafieldandthenchallengestheODcommunitytorespond.

17ResponsestoMattMinahan’sCallforStrategicChange

of the “touchy-feely” human potential, T-Group, and team building origins of the field. The name “organization develop-ment” still carries that stigma for some and for others it’s an important name badge for a humanistic values-based profession. Substituting another name without sig-nificantly changing the underlying values and practices will eventually lead to the new name being stigmatized in the same ways as the old and for the same reasons. As they say in some circles, it would be like putting lipstick on a pig. Of course, another road to travel down would be to openly own that OD is centrally concerned with opti-mistic, humanistic, democratic, people-centred approaches even if the underlying assumptions, values, and methods may be marginalized in different settings and at different times. Why own a set of values and approaches sometimes marginalized by some potential clients? Because those values and approaches are always impor-tant for the human condition even if not always embraced.

Strategic change. I need to go on record as co-authoring with Gervase Bushe

a recent book chapter arguing that posi-tioning OD as focused on dealing with change leads to difficulties and that a bet-ter positioning would be that OD creates great organizations (Bushe & Marshak, 2018). For me, there may be problems with the name organization development, but I am not persuaded “strategic change” works better unless what are now consid-ered to be some of the core elements of the field are dramatically changed. And, while perhaps sounding more appealing to for-profit corporations and business schools, I am not sure the “strategic change” name would have the same appeal to government agencies, not-for-profits, spiritual organiza-tions, volunteer organizations, and so on. I am also reminded of a time when partici-pants in a workshop I was leading initially thought the jargon term “change manage-ment” meant “change the management.” Surely someone(s) will think “strategic change” means “change the strategy.”

Let me now end this brief set of reflec-tions with the hope that my comments do not detract from the importance of Mina-han’s observations and challenges, but

instead provide some additional consider-ations and nuances to the reflections and conversations we need to have as an OD community.

References

Beer, M. (1989). Towards a redefinition of OD: A critique of research focus and method. OD Practitioner, 21(30), 11–12.

Bushe, G. R., & Marshak, R. J. (2018). Valu-ing both the journey and the destina-tion in organization development. In D. W. Jamieson, A. Church, & J. Vogelsang (Eds.), Enacting values-based change: Organization development in action. pp. 87–97. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Jamieson, D. W., & Marshak, R. J. (2018). Reasserting what OD needs to be. Organization Development Journal, 36(3), 91–103.

Robert J. Marshak, an OD practitioner and educator for more than 40 years, is a recipi-ent of the OD Network’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

For me, there may be problems with the name organization development, but I am not persuaded “strategic change” works better unless what are now considered to be some of the core elements of the field are dramatically changed.

ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT REVIEW Vol. 51 No. 3 201918

RESPONSE

Another Tree to Hug: Contemporary OD Action Research

ByDavidCoghlan

Matt Minahan comments that “there is little, or no research being done in OD.” In the context of his critique of contem-porary OD I want to add my tree to hug, namely OD action research (Shani & Coghlan, 2014). OD has a dual identity; it is a science of change and the practice of changing. At the heart of this dual iden-tity in our OD heritage is action research, which is understood as addressing the twin tasks of bringing about change in organizations and in generating robust, actionable knowledge.

While action research is one of the distinctive features of OD and one of its core origins and is powerful for practice, the original intention for scholarly contri-bution got lost. Action research typically has found itself excluded from the forum of organizational scholarly research, espe-cially in the Anglo-Saxon academy, led by the United States. This is due to the domi-nance of the positivist approach to research in the academy and the denigration of forms of research that incorporate action as smacking of subjectivism. The perspec-tive that action research is not ‘scientific’ perpetuates in some circles, although, as

it is well argued, its methods are far more scientific in the sense of generating knowl-edge that is tested in action and in mobi-lizing relevant knowledge from people in a position to know their conditions better than conventional research can. The key insight is that action research constitutes a kind of science with a different theory of knowledge that produces knowledge that is contingent on the particular situation and which develops the capacity of members of organizations to solve their own problems. In using the term, ‘scientific,’ it is argued, there is a need to move away from adopting frameworks from natural sciences in order to engage with the world of practice.

Action research used in organization development is mostly based on collabora-tion between an OD researcher and a client where they collaborate on intervening in the organization to address a relevant issue and in cogenerating actionable on the expe-rience in terms of quality criteria of being rigorous, reflective and relevant (Cogh-lan & Shani, 2014). Through its Lewinian roots in the scholarship of practice, OD has the capacity to bridge the rigor–relevance, theory–practice debates that beset contem-porary organization studies. Accordingly, action research is not only a methodology and a set of tools but is also a theory of social science.

There are rich action research stud-ies being published in outlets such as: The Journal Applied Behavioral Science and the research volumes, Research in Organiza-tional Change and Development (Emerald).

In recent years action research into core business challenges such as collabora-tion in the supply chain, the merger of two organizations and innovation, to take three examples, demonstrate the reemergence of OD research as a collaborative activity. In a broader context action research on the chal-lenges of global warming and sustainability are common. Such studies may not explic-itly use the term organization development, but they exemplify the core values of action research that is undertaken in a spirit of collaboration and co-inquiry, whereby the research is constructed with people, rather than on or for them. The OD heritage of such action research is foundational.

As my tree to hug, I hope that this short note stimulates OD scholar-practi-tioners to retrieve action research as OD research and to create knowledge that is useful for practice and robust for scholars.

References

Coghlan, D., & Shani, A.B. (Rami) (2014). Creating action research quality in orga-nization development: Rigorous, reflec-tive and relevant. Systemic Practice and Action Research, 27, 523–536.

Shani, A.B. (Rami), & Coghlan, D. (2014). Action and collaboration between schol-arship and practice: Core values of OD research. OD Practitioner, 46(4), 35–38.

David Coghlan, Trinity Business School, University of Dublin, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

The key insight is that action research constitutes a kind of science with a different theory of knowledge that produces knowledge that is contingent on the particular situation and which develops the capacity of members of organizations to solve their own problems.

19ResponsestoMattMinahan’sCallforStrategicChange

RESPONSE

In Practice: A Reflection on OD Abolished

ByRebeccaSlocum

Upon reading Minahan’s article, I can’t help but think about my recent experience consulting to a small international agency. One of my first tasks within the organiza-tion was to conduct a functional analysis of its OD function, a small team in the budget office in charge of strategic workforce plan-ning and position management.

Yes, a team in the budget office in charge of strategic workforce planning and position management.

If not evidenced by that sentence, one of my primary findings was that OD as a function was poorly understood and had been given work mostly associated with budget and HR. Meanwhile, the typical work us OD folk associate with our field (change work, org design, leadership align-ment, etc.) was occurring through the exec-utive office or via Senior Management’s appointed change team (though none of this was associated with the term "OD").

At the end of my analysis, I recom-mended to either re-brand the OD function

by re-purposing it to do true OD work, or stop trying to fit a round peg in a square hole and abolish OD altogether. I am sim-plifying the scope, substance, and context of my analysis greatly, but to make a point.

Although my little analysis was read by a few, it was mostly forgotten as we were all swept up in a massive system-wide, top-down reform sweeping through the orga-nization. Hungry for change and process skills, the reform seconded me away from my OD home and I found myself on the change taskforce.

Six months later, as part of many broader structural changes, the OD func-tion was indeed abolished. The academic in me felt sad, but the practitioner in me knew OD was being abolished in name only. Case in point: the same memo that killed OD and divided its remains between HR and budget also created a new change function reporting directly to Senior Man-agement. The head of the unit was the for-mer taskforce leader, an individual with over twenty years of brass-tax, bottom-line, feet-on-the-ground political savvy and bud-get experience. One of his first hires as a consultant? Me.

I have changed greatly as a practitio-ner through my experience working in this organization. I have seen first-hand as its budget office tried to diagnose an ailing

OD. I was pulled into a world of executive-led, aggressive, top-down change. And now I am employed by a change leader, whose strict no "fairy dust" and "watch the num-bers" approach sometimes makes me want to throw a flipchart marker. But, I have learned critical skills I did not have as a newly minted practitioner: an understand-ing of budget, fluency with workforce and data analytics, and the ability to understand and tolerate the most frustrating of inter-nal politics.

These things make me a better prac-titioner and of more use to my client. And though I know I will always be doing OD and living by the values our field espouses (I clamour for participation and process until I’m blue in the face), I no longer introduce myself as an OD consultant. Depending on my mood and the venue, I am a change consultant, a change strate-gist, or a process facilitator. I’m still figur-ing it out. But as long as I do good work, no one outside the field seems to notice I’ve dropped the OD.

Rebecca Slocum is an independent consul-tant who works primarily with international organizations and development agencies. She can be reached at rebecca.slocum@gmail.com.

I no longer introduce myself as an OD consultant. Depending on my mood and the venue, I am a change consultant, a change strategist, or a process facilitator. I’m still figuring it out.

ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT REVIEW Vol. 51 No. 3 201920

RESPONSE

Will Strategic Change Better Position Organization Development?

ByGervaseR.Bushe

There is a lot I agree with in Minahan’s article.

In addition to the loss of OD schol-arship, the OD brand is poorly defined and has lost much of its potency in the US, even as OD as a brand, is ascendant in other parts of the world. Without some kind of certification standards and pro-cesses, that may be difficult to change. But we are faced with the big problem that cer-tification standards, in any profession, mainly rely on developing a set of skills and competencies. OD, on the other hand, also depends on the psychological development of the person. In the language becoming popular in leadership development circles, it’s about vertical (psychological) devel-opment as well as horizontal (skills and knowledge) development. Around 1990 I administered Loevinger’s Ego Develop-ment test (the gold standard in measuring vertical development) to thirty-seven OD consultants who were members of Certified Consultant’s International (an attempt to certify OD consultants led by Herb Shepard that folded around 1990). While in the nor-mal population somewhere between 5 and 20 percent of US adults scored at post-conventional (higher) stages of ego devel-opment, over 70% of that group of OD practitioners did. We don’t have models for how to develop people vertically or exam-ples of how to certify it. We can measure it though—there’s a thought. Maybe we should start with requiring a certain level of vertical development for certification, or inclusion in graduate programs in OD.

Higher levels of vertical develop-ment would certainly fit with my experi-ence of who thinks of themselves as OD. Around the world I have met hundreds of people who are "OD". We almost instantly

recognize each other as being of the same tribe. Being in a job with an OD label does not guarantee they are part of the tribe. Those in the tribe remind me of the peo-ple who mentored me into this field, and the people I’ve met who created the field. They are like the people who are part of my HSDP group—a Northwest remnant of what was once Certified Consultants Inter-national. They are like the people I went to school with at Case, like those I meet when I go to an NTL gathering, or a gather-ing at Ashridge or Roffey Park in the UK, or INOC in Germany, or CSHR in Japan. Sometimes they identify with the OD label and sometimes they don’t but they are the people I’d certify if I had the magic wand.

What is similar about these people?1. They are all deeply engaged in personal

development. They believe that being able to help develop others, teams, and organizations requires first working on themselves, deep self-awareness, being self-reflexive in their interactions with others, able to retain a strong sense of self in the midst of other’s anxieties and transference. They have a good sense of unconscious processes, in themselves and others. They notice paradox and polarity and don’t reduce it to conflict and "either/or". They have healthy psy-chological boundaries.

2. They appreciate and are quick to engage in deep and authentic personal disclo-sure. They prefer to work with others they can develop strong relationships with that go beyond the transactional to the personal. They believe in the power of awareness, and that the best way to improve relationships, teams and organizations is to get people to talk to themselves about themselves.

3. They are fascinated by, and usually con-versant with, a wide variety of theo-retical and practical aspects of human interaction. This includes theory and research on being human, relation-ships between people, group processes, inter-group processes, organizational processes and design. And they are knowledgeable about and work with a variety of change processes. Working

with multiple lens at multiple levels of analysis may be one of the problems with OD being able to define itself, of "being about everything and therefore nothing". But it is also one of the great-est strengths of this tribe of practitio-ners and a key value-add they bring to any project.

It’s difficult to imagine such a list of attri-butes being used as certification crite-ria. What is common about what they do, is that they engage people who have to change, in inquiry of some sort that leads to improvement. Which is how I define OD and differentiate it from other change and organizational effectiveness processes. Our interest in improvement is why OD peo-ple constantly incorporate new ideas and processes they can use to engage the peo-ple who will have to change in some kind of inquiry that will lead to improvement. This constant ferment and innovation in practice (even if it doesn’t show up in OD textbooks) is one of the gifts of not having rigid certification standards, and one of the paradoxes a good certification regimen will have to manage.

Where I part company with Matt is in his suggestion that we toss OD and cre-ate a new label for our field of "strategic change". On the one hand, I agree that strategic change is ambiguous enough to encompass a lot of different facets of OD, and it’s appealing from a business point of view. But trying to be appealing is part of what I think got us into this problem in the first place. I have written about how I think the field got hi-jacked when it hitched itself to "change" because at the time that seemed appealing. It led others to think we were about change management—which we definitely are not. The tribe I call OD is interested in development, a specific kind of change that has, at least, the three qualities Matt quotes me as describing a good organization. I use the three quali-ties of increasing levels of self-awareness, more driven by reason than emotion, and increased capacity to actualize potential, as markers of development, outcomes of good OD, and criteria for more developed

21ResponsestoMattMinahan’sCallforStrategicChange

organizations. ODers aren’t interested in change per se; we want to create great teams and organizations. The label "strate-gic change" could be applied to the intent to create great teams and organizations, but in the popular mind I doubt it will. More likely it will be seen as aligning with strategy—figuring out what is going on outside (and sometimes inside) the organi-zation and planning how to succeed in the midst of that. If we simply change being confused with change management, for being confused with strategy, I don’t think we will have progressed too much.

I agree with Matt about the need to let go of some the past and move on. I recog-nize the appeal of re-branding; it can feel

like a fresh start. But I have two reasons to suggest we stick with organization devel-opment. One, and the most important, is that we have seventy years of embedded wisdom and practice called OD. Poten-tially we would be accelerating how quickly that would get lost if we abandoned the OD label. Recent compilations like NTL’s Handbook of OD, or Wiley’s Practicing OD, are filled with great stuff. The big problem is that much of that wisdom is unknown outside the field. Take for example Google’s recent study on what makes a great team. It’s getting a lot of attention in business circles by people who are unaware that OD knew all about this in 1975. And this points to the second reason: because so few

people have any idea what OD is, it doesn’t need a re-branding. I don’t believe there is so much of an already embedded bias against OD that we need to call it some-thing else. Maybe that was true 20 years ago but when I enter a new client system and say what I do is OD, what I get is curi-osity. I can define it any way I want and no one disagrees. If some group wanted to put the effort into making OD a "thing," I don’t think it would be much different from making "strategic change" a thing.

Gervase R. Bushe is Professor of Leadership and Organization Development, Beedie School of Business, Simon Fraser University. www.gervasebushe.ca

I don’t believe there is so much of an already embedded bias against OD that we need to call it something else. Maybe that was true 20 years ago but when I enter a new client system and say what I do is OD, what I get is curiosity.

ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT REVIEW Vol. 51 No. 3 201922

RESPONSE

By Any Other Name…

ByDavidW.Jamieson

My respected friend Matt Minahan has written a very powerful article on the state of the OD field and made strong cases for the mess we have created and for how it’s time to stand up for who we are and what we can do. I am clearly on board for all of that, but not sure changing the name will help. A major aspect of our slow unravel-ing comes from how poorly we described what we can do and what value it has, how distant we keep ourselves from integrating with leaders in business, and I think inter-nally allowing damn near everything to be labeled OD! We also rarely sold our field well in terms of what value it added to orga-nizations in terms of measures other peo-ple cared about, like results.

I think many of us know that when OD is done well, the organization per-forms better and the people are more sat-isfied and engaged. Yet, most of our work had no evaluations and most of our mes-saging lacked value-add information. So we ended up in many places working at the margins on less than strategic endeavors. But I blame most of this on not getting our

internal act together and being clear what we did that was unique and different from what most did when they tried to change organizations. Our essence got lost! What set us apart was overshadowed by the shine of various techniques or the trumpet of popular trends. And, too often, to get work, we would undermine values we knew can make a difference in order to please some-one’s speed or command dictates. If we had only and could only now spell out how OD works differently, why and how and teach that to managers on their way up and embed it in leadership development and attach it to other fields that also help organizations to improve (PM, CM, Six Sigma, etc.).

We also never really had any form of governance that any of us would listen to. We set few boundaries, standards, criteria or anything that would help create an iden-tity that could be understood. In some ways we were too independent, too inclusive and too unsure if we could have boundaries or standards that excluded some and set a higher bar?

Matt has gathered all the reasons and all the errors along the way. We will need real clarity going forward whatever we call ourselves. Any more vague, ancillary or nice-to-do actions will not rise to the top.

Our work used to be directly related to the organization and its people who make it function and how effective it ran, produced results and made a healthy workplace. How it was designed, how people were prepared for the work, how well decisions were made by the right people, how quickly adaptations could be made and what val-ues guided everyday operations and inter-actions. That’s where we need to be again, starting with key strategic conversations that drive much of what is needed today in our VUCA world. Yes, we should be about Strategic Change and sitting next to smart leaders facing unknown challenges, exactly when we need more engaged resources involved in determining and executing what’s next. And short-cycle processes that accelerate learning and action-taking as the nature of the complex systems emerge. The core principles of OD are made for today if we just focus on the essence and design for what is present.

No more 5- step instructions, one size fits all, or hammers looking for nails. There is a better way!

David W. Jamieson, PhD, President, Jamieson Consulting Group, Inc.

A major aspect of our slow unraveling comes from how poorly we described what we can do and what value it has, how distant we keep ourselves from integrating with leaders in business, and I think internally allowing damn near everything to be labeled OD!

23ResponsestoMattMinahan’sCallforStrategicChange

RESPONSE

A Socio-Economic Approach to Managment

ByJohnConbere&AllaHeorhiadi

We appreciated Matt Minahan’s essay on the current state of OD, and for the most part we agree with him. We would like to add a few ideas to the discussion from the perspective of the Socio-Economic Approach to Management (SEAM).

Very briefly (since one can earn a PhD in SEAM at the University of Lyon in France), in 1973 Henri Savall took the results of his two doctoral dissertations and created SEAM which is both a philosophy of management and an intervention pro-cess which drew heavily from the founders of OD. He created theory, and over 2000 case studies have validated the theory, in the manner of Robert Yin’s positivistic case study (Case study research: Designs and methods, Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage Pub-lications, 2003). The research continues, and it appears likely that SEAM is the most researched OD approach in the world. We disagree with Matt that "there is little to no research being done in OD." It is being done in France.

Savall describes socio-economic as two sides of a coin, each different but insepa-rable from the other. Socio refers to the need to attend to the people needs of an organization. Economic refers to the finan-cial needs. His point is that OD done with-out attending to both faces of the coin will fail. Matt describes well the failure of many OD efforts because of the lack of attention to the economic needs of the organization. We also know from experience that when people’s needs are ignored, it is difficult to create positive and sustainable change.

In this way SEAM could be a poster child for the future of OD. We are not saying that SEAM is the only way. We are saying that SEAM is a well-researched model for organizational and strategic change that deserves attention.

Minahan described the need for The-ory E and Theory O to create sustainable change. Both are present in SEAM. The intervention begins with top leaders, and then cascades through the organization department by department. Leaders shape organizational strategy. Employees at all levels identify what is not working well and create processes that work. Top down and bottom up.

After decades of work, Savall and his colleagues reflected on the cause of most dysfunctions. They created a metaphor for the modern mental model of manage-ment, the TFW virus (named for Taylor, Fayol, and Weber). The "virus" is the cause of most dysfunctions. Therefore, to cre-ate healthier organizations, managers need to change their mental model of manage-ment to something that embraces the com-bination of Theories E and O. We add this thought to Minahan’s essay: to succeed in OD, or strategic change, the mental model of many managers has to transform. Thus, one of the primary tasks of the strategic change practitioner is changing the beliefs of top managers about management. With-out changing beliefs an intervention is likely to fail, or to be irrelevant.

One of SEAM’s differences from most OD is its philosophical tenet that the only way to create positive sustainable change that will increase an organization’s bottom line is by developing the human poten-tial of its employees. This is the socio-economic link. Value is not increased by structural changes, firing people, increas-ing technology. Value grows when workers’ ability grows. At the same time develop-ing employees costs money. In SEAM the

development is financed through reduc-ing the hidden costs which drain the orga-nization’s resources. This works because the average cost of dysfunctions is over $20,000 per employee per year. That fig-ure is the result of decades of research. Our SEAM work in the US confirms the cost per employee per year.

There is in SEAM a working model for assessing the financial value of an inter-vention. In a SEAM intervention the con-sultants assess the dysfunctions in an organization, calculate the cost of the dys-functions, and then measure the change in the cost of dysfunctions on a yearly basis. Leaders can get ROI figures annually.

Finally, we would add to the essay the need for OD/strategic change practitio-ners to address the issue of greed. We sus-pect many might agree with us, but we do not see greed spelled out as an issue that OD needs to address. In the last year CEO pay rose "almost twice the rate of ordinary workers." (Eavis, New York Times, May 24, 2019). The median CEO pay is $18.6 mil-lion. Some CEOs make 1000 times as much as employees at the bottom of the hierarchy. Some received huge golden para-chutes after they failed to lead their com-panies to financial profitability. When employees are fired and the CEO gets a huge raise, how can we expect employees to be positive? Greed at the top probably is not a task that most practitioners want to take on. At the same time greed has to be addressed if we want healthy organizations. Perhaps this is an area in which research is needed. We suggest that corporate greed should be part of our collective strategic change agenda.

John Conbere, MDiv, EdD & Alla Heorhiadi, PhD, EdD. SEAM Institute www.seaminstitute.org

We are not saying that SEAM is the only way. We are saying that SEAM is a well-researched model for organizational and strategic change that deserves attention.

ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT REVIEW Vol. 51 No. 3 201924

RESPONSE

Evolving Systems Do Not Wait for Stuck Humans

ByYabomeGilpin-Jackson

I agree with Minahan’s assessment of the state of our field and in particular that we seem to be stuck in the same back to the future loop in this conversation. It was my similar attempt to shine a different light on the conversation that had me reflect and write the ODP article “It’s Time to Make Organization Development Our Client” just last year. In that article, I examined our competing commitments to our own prog-ress. I also call for amplifying our unique value proposition as well as working at the full scope of our practice as Matt surmises. I likewise believe we can be both unapolo-getically humanistic AND relentless about demonstrating business and organizational impact. I proposed that we 1. Claim our unique value and space of

supporting development in organiza-tions and practicing OD

2. Expand OD practice domain to work at full espoused scope.

3. Return to the values-base of our field. 4. Build and share portfolios of cases and

research. 5. Forge new partnerships with upcoming

and growing fields 6. Engage in disruptive practice

What Minahan’s reflections brought up for me is the reality that evolving systems do not wait for stuck humans. As with all complex adaptive systems, the business leaders and systems we are meant to serve are currently self-correcting. Therefore, I believe what we are experiencing as the diminishing of Organization Development (OD) jobs, programs and research are sim-ply signals of a system forming a new pat-tern to better serve its needs… for now… at this point in history.

Thus, what is (was?) OD capabilities are being drawn as both Matt and I have shown, into adjacent fields of practice that

do what we have not been doing. Change Management, Project Management, Tal-ent Development, IT Planning, Agile, Man-agement Consulting and various Training functions—these fields and others have all claimed pieces of OD while we have been developing our auto-immune disorder and struggling on life support. In my internal role, Strategic Change has already been used as a title/description for adjacent dis-ciplines that support major change initia-tives. This has led to many partnership conversations about the similarities, differ-ences and overlaps in our fields of theory and practice. Taking a moment to reflect on what these areas offer that OD currently does not, it is not hard to see the emerg-ing pattern. While complexity and uncer-tainty increase with the dawn of our 4th industrial evolution, our clients and orga-nizations are looking for more clarity, more clear measures, outcomes, processes and linkage to their strategic goals. We, as a field, are not providing that and other areas are identifying what’s needed and respond-ing to the needs accordingly. The system likes that and is embracing it.

However, the need to navigate uncer-tainty will not go away. And the need to attend to our fundamental human needs that are often starved when certainty is a primary motivation will continue to be a gnawing gap. This is our ace. Developing the people and organizations with the capa-bilities of the future… including withstand-ing and navigating through complexity and emergence, is our salvation. The need for our unique DNA is not going away, it is just currently being diffused or pushed underneath the certainty stake—sent underground—and hence our experience of the ‘death’ and ‘dying’ of OD.

Meanwhile, as I show and illustrate in “It’s Time to Make Organization Devel-opment Our Client,” scholarship and practices that without a doubt have all the makings of what full spectrum OD is meant to be in these times are thriving. These emerging areas are both responsive to organization/business needs AND help organizations navigate through uncertainty

to achieve their goals. Dialogic, Evidence-informed, Outcome-focused. BOTH humanistic AND objective. These prac-tices sometimes identify themselves as part of OD and sometimes do not. What is true from observation is that most of these emerging fields do not call them-selves Organization Development, even when they locate within the field. Hence—Human Systems Dynamics, Large-scale Change, Appreciative Inquiry, Positive Organization Scholarship, Liberating Struc-tures, Deliberately Developmental Organi-zations etc. The recognition that these are all housed within the ‘new’ OD needed for our complex emergent times is what makes Dialogic OD compelling.

So my conclusion—we are already in the throes of many name changes that are being ‘done to us.’ The closed question we face is—and yes, it is a closed one to frame the conversation prior to any open/gen-erative ones to explore possibilities: Are we willing to let go of our sacred cows to be proactive in redefining ourselves? We have a choice to move from victims to cre-ators of our own future—just like we tell our clients.

I agree that we need to stake our claim and fight for the reinstatement of our full scope of practice so that we can be the game changing influencers we are meant to be in organization and world systems.

I believe a name change may or may not be necessary to get us there if it only ends up being a repackaging/rebranding while we keep our sacred cows and com-peting commitments intact. For example, it is more essential that we let go of our tendency for independence than for us to agree on a name change… and then all go rogue and do as we please… again.

I believe what is critical is that ALL OD scholars and practitioners INSIST on the needed elements of Minahan’s to-do list and my prior proposals. We must impress on our school administrators and clients what OD is and isn’t and demand the resources and commitment needed to achieve the results we seek… including conducting quality research and tracking

25ResponsestoMattMinahan’sCallforStrategicChange

business impact & goal achievement. We must also be willing to be accountability to set and achieve the standard of practice needed to demonstrate our commitment to an integral full-scale OD that will deliver our promise to the world. Oh-oh! Does this bring us back to that age-old back to the future conversation about professionaliza-tion, standards and credentialing?!

I think it’s our game we need to change… not our name.

Reference

Gilpin-Jackson, Y. (2018). It’s Time to Make Organization Development Our Client. OD Practitioner, 50(2), 7–15.

Yabome Gilpin-Jackson, PhD, identifies as a Scholar-Practitioner. She is Executive Director of Leadership & Organization Development (OD) at Fraser Health in Surrey, BC, and consults/coaches externally as well.

I agree that we need to stake our claim and fight for the reinstatement of our full scope of practice so that we can be the game changing influencers we are meant to be in organization and world systems

ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT REVIEW Vol. 51 No. 3 201926

RESPONSE

How Can We Help? Positioning Our Work

ByPeterF.Norlin,PhD

What is the true purpose and value of our work? For me, the most concise, com-pelling frame is embedded in only four words—the question Ed Schein reportedly used when he met a new client: How can I help? Obviously, the responses we hear to that deceptively simple question determine every step that follows: the perspectives on the situation that we offer; the opportunities for learning and change that we propose; the choices for action that we recommend; and the contract that emerges. We know, of course, that the work we ultimately do will focus on building the capacity and increas-ing the effectiveness of people at work. Whatever the place, whatever the task, whatever the goals, however, our overarch-ing purpose is always to be helpful, to enable people and organizations of every size and shape to do their best work, to meet their own expectations, and to reach their own specific, chosen goals. What we would be wise to recognize now is that defining our intention as helping, and then fulfilling that purpose visibly and credibly, infuses our field with singular power.

The Singular Power of Our Work

What is the source of our potential power and influence? And what differentiates our field from others that are also in the busi-ness of learning and change (e.g., clinical psychology)? When I take a step back, I see at least three, key circles that intersect in our own professional Venn diagram, and these represent capacities that (I believe) no other fields can offer. From opening con-versations (i.e. how can I help?) with clients, to end-of-engagement evaluation measure-ment and after-action reviews, we are able to offer them: » A marginal perspective—from the edge,

a wide-angle view of the system’s inner hydraulics.

» The whole context—an aerial view of the system’s entire inner and outer envi-ronmental landscape.

» The relational field—an X-ray map of the internal web of formal and infor-mal relationships that glue the system together.

We know from working with clients that each of these specific lenses can gener-ate hypotheses, information, and data that guide a client to make decisions and imple-ment strategies that increase an organiza-tion’s effectiveness. Our work, however, offers an additional, even more important source of power: the opportunity to inte-grate these different frames of reference, to see the pattern that connects, and to identify the grand, foundational narrative guiding the conversations that now hold the organi-zation in its current reality.

This means that when we sit know-ingly and comfortably in the center of our own, professional Venn diagram (where marginal, whole-system, and relational perspectives intersect); and when we can notice what is working, what isn’t, and more importantly, think about why; we are then in a position to unleash the unparal-leled, singular power that’s available only through our work.

Because whatever we do to “help” our clients (e.g., individual, group, and/or whole organization solutions), as a field we bring them a unique resource: a merg-ing of theory, practices, and expertise that enable us to propose and design effec-tive, collaborative solutions to meet what-ever needs for learning and change they bring us. And so, our “help” can—or could hypothetically—encompass all of it. Cor-recting operational dysfunction? Develop-ing and implementing business strategy? Sharpening strategic thinking and assess-ment of business models? Re-designing and improving business processes? Check. Advising and guiding senior leadership teams? Detecting and correcting flaws in organization structures? Shaping cultures to stimulate creativity and innovation? Assessing leadership talent and design-ing succession plans? Check. Coaching

leaders and executives? Strengthening gov-ernance frameworks and advising boards of directors? Facilitating inclusion and col-laboration in work teams? Check. The point is, whatever the business need, what-ever the human dilemma, we are the field that should be able to respond to any and all of it. More to the point, we should also be acknowledged and appreciated for our unique professional role and the focus of our work.

The Insurmountable Opportunity?

One way that we might increase the visibil-ity, credibility, and impact of our work is going back to the future. Over 50 years ago we were already defining an organization as a “sociotechnical system,” and analyz-ing its effectiveness first by identifying pat-terns in each of those channels separately, and then using a holistic lens to determine how successfully they were being inte-grated in overall organization performance. As we became aware of specific, indepen-dent complexities in both the social and technical streams of organization life, we could then also recognize how they were interpenetrating and interdependent. Such awareness might be a potent frame now, especially if we re-commit ourselves profes-sionally to demonstrating obvious expertise along the entire axis of an organization’s sociotechnical needs, from human develop-ment (skills and relationships) to business performance (strategies and decisions). The point is, we are the field to do it, if we can mobilize the expertise and commit-ment to do it.

Now, is there a worm in this apple? Of course. Just because I think I should be able to help resolve a multiplicity of orga-nization needs doesn’t mean that I can—or want to. It means that becoming a truly helpful, professional resource is a career-long project. It requires that, as I work, I am always curious and determined to learn the whole story, and that, simultaneously, I am always becoming more competent, more capable of influencing the whole story. And so, to use myself effectively as an instrument of change in our work, I must

27ResponsestoMattMinahan’sCallforStrategicChange

be both humble and confident. I must be able to use my emotional intelligence to build relationships, and my technical exper-tise and experience to provide specific task support. In order to step confidently now into the noisy push-and-pull of a fiercely competitive marketplace and reclaim our

position as the leaders in the business of learning and change, we need to be ready. And if we know both our professional gifts and the boundaries of our work, when a cli-ent takes a risk to tell us how we can help, if possible, we’ll be able and ready to say, we can do that!

After working as the Executive Director of the OD Network and Principal of ChangeGuides, Peter F. Norlin, PhD, now serves both emerging OD practitioners and seasoned colleagues as a professional coach and shadow consultant. He can be reached at peter@peternorlin.com.

What we would be wise to recognize now is that defining our intention as helping, and then fulfilling that purpose visibly and credibly, infuses our field with singular power.

ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT REVIEW Vol. 51 No. 3 201928

RESPONSE

A Response to Change Our Name, Change Our Game: It’s Time For “Strategic Change”

ByLMee-YanCheungJudge

This is too harsh a critique of the field. It has grains of truth but infused by too much pessimism. I ask myself—is the field really that bad? Or is Minahan describing another cyclical period where any field of knowledge needs to be self-critical to stay alive in the turbulent context in which the field operates? Are the situations Minahan despairs with mainly a USA reality?

OD grew out of a reaction against the earlier Taylorism, the dominant approach of scientific management, not to mention the dark aftermath of the world wars. The context called for a more humane para-digm in looking at society, community, and organization. This was supported by a lib-eral political climate after the war. During that era, the field of OD achieved major milestones, providing powerful individual and humanistic alternatives to the mechan-ical view of the world. However, when Con-servatism returned during the 1960s, the OD community was given a very clear mes-sage from those who used us that it was no longer enough to be process facilita-tors or organization therapists. They now needed experts in work design, reward sys-tems, organization structure, and strategic formulation. It becomes clear that it is the strategic and macro system level of work that is needed with strong focus on task, work, performance, and productivity. We are asked to know what it takes for busi-nesses to survive in the harsh economic downturn. (Incidentally, does this remind us of where we are now, except with global politics gone ultra-right?)

This situation during the 1960s pro-vided a meaningful backdrop to what we are discussing now, because it was our reaction to the rejection by clients during

this period split the community into two and eventually three camps. The conflicts and splits between these three camps con-tinue to stay with us even now.

The first camp was those who worked within the conservative mandate on per-formance, task, and productivity, which Drucker called the “adaptors.” The second camp was those who continued to ground their practice on liberalism, humanistic values, even greater commitment to the growth of individual potential and partici-patory democracy, which Drucker called the “holders.” The third camp were those who thought both sides are necessary to achieve the goal of OD, and they worked hard to bridge the first and second camp. Drucker calls them the “bridgers.”

There are pros and cons of each of the camps. People like Stan Herman, Michael Beer, and Ed Schein have all warned the community that if we tip the balance over to one side (the hard side) we will sacri-fice the organization processes, the DNA of OD. But if we tip over to the soft side, we will become irrelevant to the business, which is one of Minahan’s biggest con-cerns. In fact, Greiner’s (1972) red flags, which Minahan mentioned were directed against the “holders”—because they are putting individuals before the organization, putting behaviour before diagnosis, put-ting process before task, etc. Later, Greiner directed another set of red flag signals to the “adaptors” whom he pointed out have neglected involvement of people in types of situations such as: top management deci-sion making, strategic formulation, merg-ers and acquisition, corporate governance, and personal integrity etc.

This significant piece of history affirms that our community does take the context in which we practice seriously. As a result, different practices, depend-ing on how the practitioners judge what is relevant in that changing context, and what value-added service are in the eyes of those they serve, will emerge. While self-focused motives will always be there—due to our own sense of self mastery, and what market is available to us, but our sense of political expediency will always be part of

what the community needs to do to “stay alive.” I believe, in current time, many OD practitioners already got the message, and are adjusting themselves back to the “adaptor” position.

Regardless of what our natural affinity with whichever camp: (a) we need to have a wider tolerance for those who are not in our camp; (b) all three camps are important to the development of the field.

OD has clear DNA—we are a process-driven, humanistic-based, people-focused oriented field with our dual goals to build (a) organization effectiveness in achiev-ing its strategy and vision; (b) organization health for those who work within as well as those constituents the organization aims to serve. This is our past, our NOW, our future value and operating base line, some-thing we do not say goodbye to.

Due to the changing socio-economic-political climate through time, some-times OD is welcomed with open arms, and at other times people develop anti-bodies towards anything “liberal” and this includes OD, as we are perceived as not hard enough to help organizations to drive profit and productivity. During the hostile period, we all need to hold our nerves, con-tinue to do good work, apply our life-long learning to expand/deepen our practices. We also need to cultivate new partnerships, undertake cross-disciplinary work, and work hard to take OD education to the next level. This is definitely NOT the time to retire nor give up the name of OD.

We definitely do not want to say good-bye to the past. Without the past and all the giants whose shoulders we stand on, we would not have the NOW in OD. No, we do not need a new name (this will have unfortunate ramification for the devel-opment of the field in other parts of the world). We need more OD practitioners who are institutional builders to advance the field and get better in evaluating the impact of our OD work. Finally, we need to stretch the OD curriculum across the breadth of what the business does, taking the content of all three camps seriously.

The world needs us, whether they know it or not. The NOW time calls us to

29ResponsestoMattMinahan’sCallforStrategicChange

be more of an adaptor, to be more savvy with the business reality the clients face, and to help clients to stay afloat. But we can’t do this without being “holders” also—to hold up our belief of fairness, justice, and human rights. Many clients instinc-tively know our rich OD DNA is needed to build a sustainable future. In that sense we are “bridgers” by instinct.

Fuel for the next phase of develop-ment of OD, especially in USA, will come from the borrowed energy and resources from around the world. OD is thriving in Europe, and especially in UK. The Chi-nese businesses are finding value-added help from OD in spite of their suspicious

attitude. South American OD practitioners are doing amazing things. Other African and Asian countries are ploughing away to put OD roots down in very hostile political and economic environments. The field is alive and continues developing in an excit-ing way, maybe not in the way we expected from our lenses. IODA continues to work diligently to encourage OD practitioners in other parts of the world. Their steady hard work should be applauded.

Finally, there are lots of “bridger” OD people out there, Minahan is one of them. These “bridgers” become role models for others. There are many upcoming OD tal-ents who are natural “bridgers” and they

will definitely be the ones who will keep the flags of OD flying high. We “aging” OD practitioners need to stay chill, stand up proud, tell appreciative stories of what the field has accomplished and invest our time and effort to grow the young “bridgers”—it will be they who will secure, sustain, and expand the future of OD. I am pretty sure of this. Thank you, Matt, for your passion-ate appeal to all of us to stay alive. We will!

L Mee-Yan Cheung Judge is a scholar- educator-practitioner and founder of Quality & Equality.

We also need to cultivate new partnerships, undertake cross-disciplinary work, and work hard to take OD education to the next level. This is definitely NOT the time to retire nor give up the name of OD.

ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT REVIEW Vol. 51 No. 3 201930